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Our first Product Hunt launch underperformed. What did we get wrong?

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Today we launched Nokofy on Product Hunt.

It’s our first launch here, and to be transparent, it hasn’t performed as well as we hoped.

Rather than just moving on, I’d really like to understand what we got wrong.

We have several other products we’re preparing to launch in the future, so I’d love to learn from experienced Product Hunt makers before we do this again.

If you have a few minutes to look at our Nokofy launch page, I’d really appreciate honest feedback.

What would you change?

Was our positioning clear enough?

Did the screenshots and video communicate the value of the product?

Was the tagline strong enough?

Does the product itself feel compelling for the Product Hunt audience?

Could we have prepared differently before launch day?

Or is the biggest issue simply that we launched without an existing Product Hunt audience/community?

I’m especially interested in hearing from makers whose first launch underperformed and who later had a much stronger launch.

What did you change the second time?

Feel free to be critical — that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I’d rather understand our mistakes now and do better with the next launch.

Thanks, everyone!

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Here’s our Product Hunt page:

We’re looking for honest, critical feedback — not upvotes. We have 4 more startups to launch, so we really want to understand what we could do better next time.

Thanks! 🙂

 I am new to the platform so can not provide much insights into that but would be watching this space closely. On the platform, generally SEO based websites allows you to put your website in and generate a quick report, and then ask you to sign up for detailed reports etc. Would it be possible to do on your platform as well? And good luck with the other platforms' launch as well. I am currently going through the startup launch phase, and going through each of those platforms I am like yes I would use that and know exactly the pain point :) I had to build some of those features at a very small level in my admin section and integrate with external APIs to manage marketing side.

 Thanks a lot for the feedback! Really appreciate it.

The quick website report before signup is a great point. We already have the audit engine behind Nokofy, so allowing someone to enter their website, get an initial SEO score and see a few key issues before creating an account is definitely something we can explore. It could make it much easier for new users to understand the value before signing up.

And I completely understand what you mean about building small versions of these tools yourself. That’s actually one of the main reasons we’re building Nokofy and our other products — we kept running into the same problems and having to connect multiple tools and APIs to solve them.

Good luck with your startup launch as well! Would love to see what you’re building. 🚀

 Hey! Something from the other side of your plan rather than the launch page: you've got four more startups to launch, and I'd think about that before the tagline.

I've built 6 separate products, each under its own name, and separate names mean separate audiences. What carries between them is the person (author). If the same maker has been useful in threads for a few weeks before each launch, the next one starts with people who already know the name under the comment

Most of your list is about the page: tagline, screenshots, video. Those decide what happens once someone arrives. With 14 views on this thread and no audience going in, I'd be careful drawing conclusions about the page from this launch.

Disclaimer: I haven't launched here myself yet, so this is from building products, not from the leaderboard

4 years ago, I launched a product with a few friends called - it reached #8 on product hunt but we probably made 8 dollars to share between the 3 of us.

I've heard of the opposite side where a product didn't do too well here but made it big. I think product hunt should be 1 out of the several marketing strategies you use because we can't ignore that luck can play a big role to rank higher here.

In terms of some thoughts I had looking at the page:

  1. The screenshots are really busy and text heavy, perhaps have a look at the top performers for screenshots - it is what I'd do

  2. AI tools seem to do well as that is the hype and your platform also has this however it gets lost in the words and the screenshots - probably need to lead with this to work with the AI hype train, part of your title or subtitle

  3. Don't forget that you can relaunch the same product again every 3 months, I believe Notion didn't gain traction till the second or third launch

  4. I think the subtitle or title needs (and screenshots) needs to have more description of the benefits rather than the feature - Maybe `SEO, AEO and GEO in one account: audit, write, fix, rank` becomes `SEO, AEO and GEO in 5 mins` - just an example as I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of SEO

  5. I like the story - you built this with your husband, people like such stories so lean into this. Try putting this same story on other platforms in a shorter way and who knows it might succeed there

Good luck and keep going. You only don't succeed when you stop trying.